Commercial advertising remains an irritant to many television viewers and radio listeners, disrupting the normal flow of a television program with information that the viewer may find of marginal or no interest. The amount of advertising shown to viewers and listeners has also been steadily rising. According to one Nielsen survey, in 2009, broadcast networks averaged 13 minutes and 25 seconds of commercial time per hour, a figure that rose to 14 minutes and 15 seconds by 2015. Cable television advertising amounted to 15 minutes and 38 seconds per hour in 2013. Spending by advertisers has also increased to $78 billion in 2013, compared to $64 billion in 2009.
The advertising burden is not limited to broadcast and cable television. Streaming services such as Hulu and Spotify (among others) interject advertising into their program streams and in some instances disable the viewer's ability to skip or mute the commercial.
The quantity of commercial advertising is only one part of the problem. In response to complaints that commercial advertisers were intentionally raising the volume of commercials to draw attention, the Commercial Advertisement Loudness Mitigation Act, Public Law 111-311, was passed in 2010. The Act requires that commercials have the same average volume as the programs that they accompany. However, the FCC has received complaints that broadcasters have been manipulating the volume in commercials so that the volume was increased at the beginning, and softer in the middle, so that the average volume matched the underlying program. During hearings on revisions to the Act, the FCC disclosed that it had received over 20,000 complaints beginning with the 2012 effective date of the Act.
Currently, when a consumer is watching or listening to media, and an advertisement is broadcast, the consumer may manually mute the programming, or in the case of recorded content, fast-forward or skip past advertisements using a remote control. However, to avoid commercial content (or other undesirable programming) the user must manually engage the television, DVR, or other device, and monitor the same until the desired programming resumes. Such a system is unwieldy, distracting, and often results in the user missing segments of the program.
Some broadcast systems—such as Hulu—disable the ability to fast-forward through commercial content. The user is thus required to wait the duration of the commercial and monitor the same so the he or she does not miss the beginning of the desired content. Similarly, some systems—Spotify, for example—will monitor the user's volume level and detect if the user has muted the volume. If the volume has been muted, the system will actually wait, pausing the commercial content, until the volume level has been restored to an audible level. The user is thus required to listen to the commercial content even on services that they may have sought out for a commercial-free experience.
Systems for skipping commercial content have been proposed, all of which have significant shortcomings. For example, one commercial skipping technology relied on the presence of a black screen that would appear in the program stream between a program and advertisement to differentiate between the two. When the black screen appeared the system would know to skip to the subsequent black screen that indicated the resumption of non-commercial programming. Over time, broadcasters removed the black screen, which rendered the technology obsolete.
A more recent device, the Hopper DVR by DISH Network, relies on a centralized database of advertisement times in broadcasts and sends those times to the remote DVRs, which allows the customer to automatically skip commercials in the broadcast. However, this system requires monitoring all broadcast television programs and identifying the time brackets when commercials were shown. When the user watches a recording of the show, the system interacts with the database to identify when to automatically skip the commercials. This system is problematic in that it is highly labor intensive and expensive to implement. The system is also limited to subscribers of a specific content provider.
The TV Ad Blocker system attempts to remove advertising from television broadcasts by utilizing a centralized database. However, this product requires an active Internet connection during television viewing and cannot provide blocking of non-television content such as streaming video or audio. Further, the TV Ad Blocker requires an identification of the service provider and cannot operate merely by monitoring the content.
Other mechanisms have been attempted for blocking content beyond just commercial advertising. For example, the V-chip standard in the United States requires that broadcasters provide rating information (indicating the amount of violence, adult language, etc.) for their programming, and television manufacturers include a chip for decoding the program rating and selectively blocking programming that exceeds a user-defined threshold. However, the V-chip system has significant limitations. First, the V-chip system requires the participation of broadcasters to rate their programming and encode that rating in the broadcast signal. Second, the V-chip system does not currently work with commercial programming, as there is no requirement to encode that content with a rating. Even if the V-chip system were extended to commercial programming, only violent or other age-inappropriate content could be blocked. There is no mechanism for blocking all content that is, for example, a television commercial. Since the companies behind the commercials are the customers of the broadcast networks, it is unlikely that they would also be willing to facilitate a system that blocked commercial content.
As television viewing is often a family or group experience, commercial interruption can take time away from family or group interaction.
Accordingly, there is a need for a system for blocking or muting undesirable programming that is automated and requires limited or no intervention by a user.
There is a further need for a content-blocking system that operates on multiple networks and is independent of the content provider or broadcaster.
More specifically, there is a need for a system that, when recognizing an advertisement, will mute or skip that advertisement, then un-mute or un-block the media once that advertisement has finished playing, or begin playing at a point after the advertisement has ended.